Raspberry Pi 2

The RPi wiki page states as follows:

I'm not sure if the passwords have been changed since then, but in case of doubt, you can ask in the freebsd-arm mailing list.
Thanks for the response, these were the passwords that other reported to work on June 24th.
All of my servers are FreeBSD so really want this to work. I have 5 Pi2 that I use for other networking stuff, so wanted to get them off Linux and on BSD also. I have been following threads on this subject for months before I felt it might be ready. It surely it is not if we can't even get default passwords without joining a mail list. How can Linux get this working and we can't... wish I had more time. Thanks for the suggestion. Fred
 
It surely it is not [ready] if we can't even get default passwords without joining a mail list. How can Linux get this working and we can't... wish I had more time. Thanks for the suggestion. Fred

You are being a bit dramatic. 11-CURRENT works just fine on RPi2, and now you know the possible password combinations. (Another one I have come across a couple of weeks ago: root with empty password) If you really were as keen to get it running as you say, you wouldn't let this put you off. This has very little to do with FreeBSD vs Linux. Plus, you could mount the image and customise things like passwords before booting it on the RPi2.
 
Actually not dramatic at all, sure there are lots of things I could do to get this to work. But the simplest thing is to put the Raspberrian SD card back into the Pi2 till someone dealing with this image can write up something with passwords that work. BTW, if you don't know the root password that was set on the image you don't have as you called it "works just fine on RPi2". Here is a device that has hit the world by storm, has sold 2.5 million units in 2 months, and FreeBSD will be one of the last OS to run on it. Even winblows runs on it. BTW I am not a Linux guy been on Unix for the last 30 years... am also not inexperienced, just don't have time for another project that needs fixed before I can use it, when I can wait till someone publishes the information they should have already published. Fred
 
Actually not dramatic at all, sure there are lots of things I could do to get this to work. But the simplest thing is to put the Raspberrian SD card back into the Pi2 till someone dealing with this image can write up something with passwords that work. BTW, if you don't know the root password that was set on the image you don't have as you called it "works just fine on RPi2". Here is a device that has hit the world by storm, has sold 2.5 million units in 2 months, and FreeBSD will be one of the last OS to run on it. Even winblows runs on it. BTW I am not a Linux guy been on Unix for the last 30 years... am also not inexperienced, just don't have time for another project that needs fixed before I can use it, when I can wait till someone publishes the information they should have already published. Fred
Did you opened a PR for this issue?
 
I'm just about to order a Pi 2 to have a play around with.

Is it possible to run one with only the FAT partition containing the bootloader on the SD card, while the entire FreeBSD installation resides on a USB storage device (flash stick or HDD)? Can the SD-card based loader be configured to find the kernel/modules and root filesystem on a different device?
 
I recopied my FreeBSD 11-Current image to the microSD card and gave it another try. This time it worked. I realized what probably happened before was FreeBSD turns off the Pi's external light while Raspbian leaves the light on, so it looks like the Pi is powering off. It takes a while for my montor to detect a signal from the Pi when its running FreeBSD too, so the combination of a blank monitor and no light make it seems like the Pi wasn't on-line. So the first time around I probably interrupted the Pi's power while the file system resize was in progress.

Anyway, I got the Pi running, set up an account I can ssh into and things seem to be running smoothly.

At this point the one thing I feel I am missing is ZFS. When the Pi is running Raspbian, I can access my ZFS-managed devices. It seems the FreeBSD 11 image doesn't include a ZFS module or the kernel source code.

Does anyone here know if the FreeBSD ZFS module will build on the Pi? Or if there is a repository where I can download a pre-built ZFS arm module? I'd rather not have to rebuild the kernel from scratch on the Pi.

I'd like to head off any comments about ZFS not working well with the Pi's limited hardware. I've been managing 2TB of data on my Pi using Raspbian and ZFS for a month now without any problems.

Update: I was able to install the zfs module by downloading the FreeBSD source code and compiling the following modules in the sys/modules direcotry: opensolaris, zlib and zfs. Copying the resulting .k* files to the /boot/kernel directory allowed me to load the ZFS module and access my external hard drive that is managed by ZFS.

Further, I have discovered that while I can access this external drive, some copy operations cause my Pi to completely hard crash. For example, I can copy any one file I like, but copying a whole directory (ie cp * /to/destination/) brings down the operating system.

I'm also noticing sometimes files I create on the root partition (formatted with UFS) do not always survive the crash. Perhaps UFS isn't syncing in time to save its data before the crash happens. Still working on this.

Memory consumptionis fairly low, the whole Os, ZFS included, is using around 200MB of RAM.

Second update: I have found I am able to create/move/delete many files at once on either my ZFS volume OR the UFS partition. The crash only happens, it seems, when I try to bulk copy files from one file system to the other, in either direction. I can, for example, unpack the ports tree or copy the kernel source code around to various locations, so long as I stay within the boundaries of the respective file systems.


This is exactly what I was looking for. I'm replacing my previous ZFS backup server with FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi 2. Although, instead of using cp to backup files, I'm using an rsync script.
 
TzunTzai, have you been able to get files copied between UFS and ZFS devices? I'd like to know if the ZFS issues I experienced have been fixed in more recent releases.
 
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I am using 11.0 on raspi2 and I am very happy with it.
But I tried to build an image with crochet on 10.2 and it fail to download the /usr/src ... I need to use the same version on my desktop to build it, or I am missing something?
 
I am using 11.0 on raspi2 and I am very happy with it.
But I tried to build an image with crochet on 10.2 and it fail to download the /usr/src ... I need to use the same version on my desktop to build it, or I am missing something?

No, you don't need the same version of source as what was used to build your desktop. Crochet (and CURRENT FreeBSD) are really coming together to make easy-bake SD images for ARM SoC boards.

For the source, just do a:

pkg install subversion
svn co https://svn0.us-west.freebsd.org/base/head /home/ronald/src


Note that the server occasionally times out. That may be what happened to you.

Then, in the crochet directory, change config.sh and modify one line:
Code:
FREEBSD_SRC=/home/ronald/src

That way, you can keep your /usr/src intact. Crochet will use the home dir src.

BTW: Using the latest source (as shown above) adds the raspi2 capability, or so it seems. It didn't work for me on FreeBSD 10.2. I've built images for Raspi2, cubieboard2, and beaglebone with CURRENT source and Crochet, and I think it's really starting to shine.
 
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I want to know the details about the Raspberry Pi2. What are specifications of it?
What are all of its hardware component?
Also how it is different from Raspberry Pi?
What interfaces it includes?
 
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I tried the latest snapshot for FreeBSD-CURRENT on the Raspberry Pi 2. The latest image does not boot on my Pi, images from earlier in the year do. Anyone else experiencing the same issue?
 
I tried the latest snapshot for FreeBSD-CURRENT on the Raspberry Pi 2. The latest image does not boot on my Pi, images from earlier in the year do. Anyone else experiencing the same issue?
Seeing the same issue here with FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-arm-armv6-RPI2-20151217-r292413.img but havent had much time to investigate. I can only do headless boots connecting through ssh as well, so it kind of hampers my investigation attempts. Will try the image from november a bit later today to see if i can get that one to boot though.
 
Keep in mind that 11-CURRENT is a development version, which doesn't even build properly at certain times. You are bound to run into issues. Also note that ARM is still a Tier 2 platform but there's work being done on getting it to a Tier 1 status.

In short, expect breakage. Update often. Test to your heart's content. Report issues on the mailinglists.
 
While trying to install gonzoua/freebsd-gpio for Python on a Raspberry Pi2 Model B, I got a build error due to an incorrect path:
Code:
 unable to execute '/nxb-bin/usr/bin/cc': No such file or directory/nxb-bin/usr/bin/cc
Note the /nxb-bin directory. I took a look at /usr/local/lib/python2.7/_sysconfigdata.py, and the incorrect path is there (e.g.
Code:
'CC': '/nxb-bin/usr/bin/cc',

By removing /nxb-bin from all paths in _sysconfigdata.py, I was able to build and install the python gonzoua/freebsd-gpio.

Could this be caused by the installation of python2.7, without a required dependency?

I'm using FreeBSD-11.0-CURRENT-arm-armv6-RPI2-20151217-r292413.img.

Thanks - Joel
 
Could this be caused by the installation of python2.7, without a required dependency?
This isn't a dependency problem. To build packages for embedded arch (mips, arm, aarch64...) and to speed up the build process we use what we call 'native-xtools' (amd64 binaries that runs inside the arm jail thanks to binmisc). The native-xtools includes the compiler and a bunch of userland binaries (cf https://github.com/freebsd/poudriere/blob/master/src/share/poudriere/jail.sh#L358) and are stored in a 'non standard' location: /nxb-bin/. Some ports (python, perl, gnustep and maybe ruby) hardcode the full compiler path used at build stage in their 'config' file. There is no solution yet, you need to manually remove the nxb-bin prefix.
 
HDMI issue has been fixed.

Build an image with a fresh -head and it will work.

The RPi 2 port is very new and under heavy development, a few things might not work yet, so, be aware of slippery floor.

While iI've subscribed to various FreeBSD mailing list over the years, the activity on arm-freebsd is very impressive and encouraging. The rate of change (especially relative to the Pi and Pi2) is going to make things bumpy for a while. Finally got into the act myself, with a Pi2, and have been having fun. Running Xorg with the i3 wm (or wmaker) is pretty smooth. Some architecture related problems (part of that high rate-of-change) need to be ironed out before the bigger apps will run. The graphical browsers (like Webkit/Arora) compile OK, but seem to crash with issues that are IMO architecture-porting related. But, it's all coming together very quickly.

I suggest that anybody with an ARM device should subscribe to the list - of course most of you who have bothered to visit this sub-forum have already done so...
 
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